Tuesday, 14 March 2017

380 pages based on family. That is just one way to describe The House of the Scorpion. There are many themes within this book, but the one that our group found most significant was “Those you love, and those who truly love you, are a real family.” To us, this statement means that blood does not always mean family, and sometimes those you meet on the road of life are the ones that truly matter to you.

This is why we decided to make a tree that represents Matt’s real family to his blood family, Matt is the trunk to represent that he is the base of the entire story. We also put some symbols to represent the feelings Matt had associated with each person. Our tree has 3 different branches representing the separate “families” Matt has.

On one branch we put Celia and Tam Lin, representing the parent figures in Matt’s life. Matt was born a clone, meaning he doesn't have blood parents, but Celia and Tam Lin have taken on this parenting role to raise Matt like real parents would. On the other side, we put El Patron and Tom. This tree branch is rotting and dying, With thorns and rotting leaves, showing that the relationship between them and Matt is toxic. They are related by blood, but treat Matt with disrespect and take advantage of him, which gives an idea that Tom and El Patron are not the best to hang around.

Maria has her own branch to show how important to Matt she is. Her branch has flowers to represent the feelings Matt has for her. The final branch has Chacho, Fidelito and Ton Ton. These 3 boys are very important for Matt’s feeling of acceptance, as they were one of the only people who didn’t care whether or not he is a clone. They are like 3 brotherly figures to him, even though they aren't even blood-related.

Monday, 6 March 2017

Thursday, 2 March 2017

1. How did we support quieter people during the discussion?We reminded the people to talked more to give other people who haven't talked as much a chance. 2. How did we support the more talkative people in the group?We keep reminding people who have talked more to let the other people talk and the people who are currently talking can ask the people who haven't as much about their opinion. 3. What is the timestamp of our best moment of discussion, and why?When we were talking about the future predictions in the book around 7 minutes because we had a lot of good ideas and there was deep discussion about them. 4. What is our main goal for our next discussion?

Our main goal for next time is to really get the other people more involved and keep the discussion from rambling on too much so that we can fit more good ideas from other people into the time frame.

Wednesday, 1 March 2017

Within this book there are many different characters with different intentions, actions, and thoughts. For our second group project, we were asked to show characterization traits of a specific character from the book. We were asked to could either create a playlist, twitter or instagram account. We chose an instagram account so that we could use our posts and interaction with the other characters to show our understanding of characterization. The character we chose was Tom. Before we started responding and posting, we needed to take a deeper look at Tom’s actions, and what people say about him. Is he a flat or round character? What are the meanings behind his actions and thoughts? How do his actions affect other characters and the story line?We think Tom is a round character because We know quite a bit of information about him. He has some characteristics about him that are undiscovered about him but we know a lot of things that he has done and some background information about him. Some examples from the book are: “he can melt anyone's heart, with his wide innocent eyes”- page 13, On page 96 we learned that he tried to drown Maria’s dog and blame it on Matt. This is because he doesn't like clones and more specifically Matt. Maria does and he is trying to sabotage Matt so that he will become the centre of attention again and Matt will get what he deserves. This also signifies that Tom is sadistic and likely a psychopath.

He enjoys pain like when he nailed a frog to the ground and watched it try to get away. And this happened in the chapter lotus pond (p. 123)In our Instagram bio we can put a bunch of information about him that we have learned from the past pages. We can show have him express his opinion about clones using emojis. Tom is rude but not dumb. We need his captions to be clever or at least have proper grammar.

Speech evidence

This shows how clever yet menacing Tom is.He clearly stating that clones have no soul, and suggests they are inhuman but he recovers to make him seem innocent by saying he feels sorrow for them. He is directly insulting clones but makes it seem like he genuinely cares for them, even though he doesn’t.

He never replies to comments showing that he is above everybody. Tom seems to think that he is all that, and this arrogance is shown through him treating others poorly, and often not paying attention to them or their feelings.

We think Tom is a static character because he has shown no sign of change, all of his posts follow a similar formula, Selfie or a picture of him in the centre, with a snarky “dissy” caption (usually directed at someone, most likely Matt), mean comments and he likes his own post showing incredible vanity. He never really replies to comments, thinking himself above others. He asks for tags, showing his vanity and self-importance. Showing how mean he is you can see he is being mean when he is talking to Felicia on page 163 he is also very rude to matt on page 117.In the beginning of the book around page 13 he gave Maria a bottle of pee, and on page 133 ish he framed Matt for killing furball. This shows that his ways have not changed throughout the pages we have read so far.

The selfie of him shows how he has self-importance over other people and his caption “Keep talking I always yawn when I'm interested” showing how he thinks he's above everyone and doesn’t care about what anyone else has to say.

We made sure to post lots of nice comments and such on adults pages like Felicia and El Patron. This is so that we can mirror the fact that adults adore him and think he is the perfect child. On the other hand, we make sure to be diminishing of kids like Matt and Maria to show that we think they are superior to them and that we don’t like Matt. He disses Matt on his post but on the adults, he seems lovely, innocent and sweet to hide what he is really like.

Our group made sure to post lots of pictures of Tom so that people could get an idea of what he looks like. He has red hair and blue eyes.

Overall we have learned quite a bit about Tom from his actions towards others, and what people in the book have told Matt about Tom’s past. We think he is a static character with bad intentions and a quick and sharp tongue, but his looks and actions towards adults may say otherwise. We have yet to know the reason behind what made him this way, or if it’s just how he is.. I guess we'll just have to keep reading!